Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (18 page)

M
arvel’s comics were steadily dropping in circulation along with those of every other publisher. Marvel maintained its number-one position through a war of attrition, continuing to expand its line of titles despite weak sales, taking up more rack space at the newsstand and attempting to crowd out DC. Stan Lee plotted the return of black-and-white magazines, which had been on his mind since Goodman’s cancellation of
Savage Tales
. Because recent changes to the Comics Code allowed for vampires and werewolves,
Dracula Lives
,
Monsters Unleashed
,
Tales of the Zombie
, and
Vampire Tales
, each with seventy-six pages of content per month, started rolling off presses.

Along with an ever-growing lineup of reprints of Lee and Kirby’s 1960s work, a number of new superhero concepts, most of them delegated by Lee, also began rolling out steadily, ending the R&D drought of the last few years. But these new titles were more transparently tied to trends and business strategies (and loosened Comics Code restrictions) than, say,
Thor
and
Iron Man
had been. “Wherever there is a trend that has been spotted,” read a marketing objectives plan, “wherever there is a reading need to be satisfied amongst the ‘now-generation’ readership, Marvel will make every effort to capture such trends and to fill such needs.” Public-domain monsters were recast as trademark-ready supervillains and antiheroes (
Tomb of Dracula
and
Werewolf by Night
); even the former X-Men member the Beast was reimagined as a furry, monster-like character. Shortly after Evel Knievel announced plans to jump the Snake River Canyon, Roy Thomas, Gary Friedrich, and artist Mike Ploog developed Ghost Rider, a motorcycle daredevil with a flaming skull.
Luke Cage, Hero for Hire
chronicled the exploits of a jive-talking,
Shaft
-inspired ex-con from Harlem who charged a fee for good deeds.

There were now about forty titles coming out monthly. “If we even talked about an idea for a book,” Thomas said, “it immediately had to go onto a schedule and be out a few months later.” Marvel quickly moved into bigger offices down the street, at 575 Madison Avenue. One visitor described the space as it was still being finished: “The waiting room was frigid modern, pastel plush furniture and not a hint of the comic book source. The home of Spiderman, Thor, and the Fantastic Four might just as well have been the reception room of an accounting firm.”

But corporate sterility had its limits: there was a real bullpen again, a space where the production team could stretch out, with comics tacked up on walls and spilling off bookshelves. John Romita was made the official art director, a title that Lee had kept for himself until now. The staffers and freelancers who swarmed around Romita and John Verpoorten in the Bullpen—Frank Giacoia, Mike Esposito, Jack Abel, Danny Crespi, Morrie Kuramoto, Vince Colletta, George Roussos—had, between them, about two centuries of comic book experience; many of them had worked for Atlas in the 1950s. They were the remaining links to the comic industry of the past, a world of Pall Malls and neckties and corned beef sandwiches and baseball on the radio. Onto their desks came a steady stream of pages from veteran freelancers, who, thanks to Marvel’s expansion, found themselves in greater demand than they’d been in decades.

Increasingly, though, comics were becoming a young man’s game. Lee had returned to writing
Amazing Spider-Man
and
The Fantastic Four
after his sabbatical, but with his promotion to publisher and president, he left them again, this time for good. Gerry Conway, not yet twenty years old, took over
Spider-Man
, Marvel’s most popular title. After a few months under Roy Thomas,
Fantastic Four
also passed to Conway.

Thomas was busy recruiting new talent from the world of fanzines and conventions. He knew a whole network of guys who’d grown up absorbing Lee’s style and who were now out of college and eager for work. What did Marvel have to lose by letting them take a crack at turning sales around? It was, in a more modest way, a repeat of what Hollywood had been experiencing for a few years, after a conflation of big-budget disasters and the successes of
Easy Rider
and
Bonnie and Clyde
convinced the studios that they might as well throw money at scrappy film school graduates and hope for the best. The hard-core comic readers came from all over the country, although there were certain pockets—St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit—where organized fandom had most effectively incubated their obsessions. They’d move to New York and come to one of the monthly “First Friday” industry gatherings held at Roy Thomas’s apartment. Bill Everett might be there, or Neal Adams, or Denny O’Neil, or Archie Goodwin, ready with advice and contacts.

This kind of networking had been going on for a couple of years already, and the results were showing up in Jim Warren’s black-and-white horror magazines and DC’s color horror comics. But by 1972, the influx had reached a critical mass. Artist Jeff Jones had taken over, and expanded, the First Friday parties, and Neal Adams and Dick Giordano had started their own studio, Continuity, providing many an aspiring professional with early experience. The fledgling Skywald had begun hiring for its publications. And, finally, Marvel opened its gates. In the five years since Steranko and Adams, hardly anyone had managed to break in at the House of Ideas, and those who did so, struggled—Barry Smith arrived from England and lived out of a suitcase; Rich Buckler, from Detroit, subsisted on graham crackers and grilled-cheese sandwiches. But in the months after Roy Thomas’s promotion to editor in chief, as Marvel’s line expanded, pages were filled with the work of more than a dozen new artists who synthesized their forerunners’ visual trademarks into ever more intricate styles.

There was a new crop of writers as well, many of whom came up through a revolving door of staff positions. After Steve Englehart, a bearded and bespectacled conscientious objector from Indianapolis, took over Gary Friedrich’s assistant editor job,
*
he became the scripter for
The Defenders
, and then the floundering
Captain America
. When he landed
The Avengers
as well, he convinced Thomas to let him continue an eight-part story, back and forth, between that title and
The Defenders
. It was the first Marvel crossover. Englehart decided to write full-time.

Steve Gerber, a quick-witted, chain-smoking Camus obsessive who’d known Roy Thomas in Missouri, took Englehart’s place on staff. Gerber had worked as a salesman for his uncle’s used-car lot in St. Louis, but his compulsive honesty, he claimed, got him fired. He and his young family lived on food stamps until he got a job as DJ, and then at an ad agency, where he toiled under fluorescent lights writing copy for savings-and-loan commercials. “You must help me. I am dying,” he wrote to Thomas. Six months later he was in New York, and on the Marvel staff for $125 a month. He supplemented this salary by writing
Adventure into Fear
, which starred the
Savage Tales
castoff Man-Thing.

Marv Wolfman, a native New Yorker, came in next. Wolfman and his childhood best friend, Len Wein, were so inseparable, and so much alike, that other fans had taken to calling them “LenMarv.” They’d made a pact to break into the industry together, and starting in junior high, they dutifully checked off every box on the fan-to-pro trajectory list: they’d taken tours of the DC Comics offices, made mimeographed zines (Wolfman published Stephen King’s first story in one of them), organized conventions, even visited Jack Kirby’s house after school and watched him draw while Roz brought them sandwiches and milk. When they showed up at Marvel, Flo Steinberg said, “I’d wish them well and tell them to finish high school.” After graduation, they did sporadic work for DC, including the creation of a black superhero that editor Carmine Infantino nixed at the eleventh hour. Now they’d decided to strike out on their own: Wein lived with Gerry Conway and wrote horror comics for DC, and Wolfman, who’d been working at Warren, came on staff at Marvel to help them launch their black-and-white magazines.

Don McGregor—a diminutive, fast-talking, aspiring filmmaker from Rhode Island whose commentary had appeared regularly in Marvel’s letter pages, and whose stories had run in Warren magazines—sold his house, moved his wife and baby daughter to the Bronx, started proofreading, and waited for his shot at writing.

Tony Isabella, a devout Catholic and a copyboy at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, moved to New York to assist Sol Brodsky, who’d returned to Marvel and was overseeing repackaging comics for the British market. Isabella also began helping out with the monster magazines.

“I
t felt like when you watch a movie from thirty years ago,” recalled Jim Salicrup, who at fifteen years of age became an unofficial Marvel intern in 1972, “and it has an old star from decades earlier, and in small supporting parts it has these new people who would become big stars years later. I remember being starstruck by people like Bill Everett, who would be back in the office working with Steve Gerber on a very odd bunch of issues of
The Sub-Mariner
. It was these strange combinations of people coming in and out.”

But Bill Everett’s health had been diminished from years of heavy drinking. Although he’d been sober for three years, he suffered a heart attack in late 1972; he died the following February at the age of fifty-five. Shortly afterward, Syd Shores, fifty-nine, died of a heart seizure. As Stan Lee turned fifty years old, the average age of the artists of the flagship superhero titles—
The Amazing Spider-Man
,
The Avengers
,
Captain America
,
Daredevil
,
The
Fantastic Four
,
The Incredible Hulk
,
Iron Man
,
The Sub-Mariner
, and
Thor
—was forty-three. The average age of the writers was twenty-three.

Change was coming to Marvel Comics.

5

S
tan Lee came into the office a few days a week, and still looked at the covers. But when he wasn’t blinking his eyes at balance sheets and charts and annual reports, signing off on thousand-dollar merchandise licensing deals for Marvel characters,
*
or getting called into meetings with Cadence chief Sheldon Feinberg, he was speaking at college campuses, or meeting with producers, hoping to get Spider-Man and the Hulk on the big screen. It wasn’t long before he grew tired of all the boardroom stuffiness and realized he didn’t want to remain president.

It was around that time that Albert Einstein Landau came on the scene. The son of Jewish Telegraphic Agency founder Jacob Landau, and the godson of Albert Einstein, Al Landau ran a photo agency and news syndicate called Transworld Features, which had over the years provided material to Martin Goodman’s magazines. Lately he’d been socializing with Chip—they were neighbors on Fire Island—and as soon as Chip introduced him to Feinberg, he worked to ingratiate himself. Landau invited Feinberg to his home for a game of tennis, listed his accomplishments, and proposed ways in which he could improve the business. Perhaps Feinberg saw his own reflection in the short, abrupt, and aggressive Landau. By the time Chip got the news that Stan Lee was stepping down as president, Feinberg had already hired Landau. It was a done deal, and Chip was one step further down the chain of command.

“Chip was very upset about this, as were Martin and Jean,” remembered Chip’s wife, Roberta. “They thought Al was a total bullshitter. He didn’t know anything about the business at all; it wasn’t his background. He’d used Chip as a way to get to Shelly [Feinberg], and snuck in between the two of them.”

Chip’s contract soon expired. The next time that he and Landau had a disagreement, Landau’s solution was clear.

“Do you want to be fired or do you want to quit?” he asked Chip.

A
lthough he was no longer president, Lee remained publisher of Marvel Comics—and, once Chip was gone, publisher of the magazines, too. Increasingly, though, it fell to Roy Thomas to bridge the widening gap between business and editorial interests. One of Thomas’s first responsibilities as the new editor in chief had been to bring further diversification to the Marvel Universe. As the company’s initial attempts to entice a black readership (the Falcon, Luke Cage) sputtered along with middling sales, now a similarly clumsy effort was made to reach female readers, with the launch of three comics ostensibly about feminist empowerment.
*
For added authenticity (or gimmickry, depending on one’s level of cynicism), each of the three new titles was to be written by a woman. Unfortunately, there was none presently writing for Marvel, so Thomas improvised. He drafted his wife, Jeanie,
Hulk
artist Herb Trimpe’s new wife, Linda Fite, and comic conventioneer Phil Seuling’s wife, Carole. Lee came up with all three concepts the same day, and the titles spoke for themselves:
Night Nurse
,
The Claws of the Cat
, and
Shanna the She-Devil
. In the year of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” and the launch of
Ms.
magazine, Marvel’s tales of candy stripers, cat-suited sexpots, and jungle queens could hardly be called revolutionary.
*
(Lee later suggested that the title
Night Nurse
was a final legacy of his former boss: “Martin Goodman always thought there was something inherently sexy about nurses. I could never get inside his thinking there.”) It was a disappointing lineup from the beginning. For Fite, a former Marvel secretary and the only one of the three with writing experience, the problems began with the name of the series she was writing. “Why do we have to name it
The Cat
, Roy?” she asked. “Is it a
catfight
?”

Like Luke Cage, the Cat was subjected to medical experiments that gave her super powers. Instead of just super-strength, though, Greer Grant, formerly a docile homemaker, was given an intensified “women’s intuition.” (Two years later, the character was subjected to radiation, which transformed her into a furry, striped feline named Tigra. Her costume was simply a bikini.) Alas, the message of empowerment was lost on Wally Wood, whom Stan Lee hired to ink the cover of
The Cat
#1. Wood sent back Marie Severin’s pencil art with the heroine’s clothes completely removed, and Severin—who’d had more than her fill of boys’ club shenanigans over the years—had to white out the Cat’s nipples and pubic hair.

Carole Seuling departed
Shanna the She-Devil
after only a few months, and Thomas handed the reins to Steve Gerber. By the last issue, it seemed that Gerber was using the comic as a platform to question the point of its own existence. Sprawled on a bed in her leopard-skin bikini, reading from Camus’
The Stranger
, Shanna wonders: “What am I doing here—prancing through the jungle like some 1940s B-movie goddess? I came here to escape the city . . . its violence . . . its plastic landscape. So what do I do? Build a treehouse to rival the Plaza—foster a teen-age malt-shop relationship with Patrick! It’s too civilized. I should just walk away from it—try living out in the elements—test myself to the limits. At least we’d see if I’m really the superhuman ‘she-devil’ they call me!”

Night Nurse
was saddled with its own problems: At the end of October, upon returning from a weekend in Vermont, Jean Thomas told Roy that she was leaving him. The seeds of marital tensions had been sown early the previous year, when Jean was graduating from Hunter College and looking for work. Lee dangled the idea of a secretarial job and then quickly withdrew the offer. “There were some people at Marvel, never totally revealed to me, who’d felt she’d be a ‘spy’ for me on the couple of days I wrote at home, so she was frozen out,” said Thomas. “Jeanie felt I should’ve quit. But I had wanted to defer the decision till I’d talked it over with her, and by that time my moment to ‘play hero’ had passed. I guess, in her mind, I had failed the test by not standing up for her.” And in Thomas’s mind, his coworkers had failed the test of loyalty. The bloom was off the rose. His feelings about Marvel would never fully recover.

W
ithin nine months, all three of the distaff titles had gotten the ax. “It’s kind of a shame,” Thomas lamented. “You could get blacks to buy comics about whites, but it was hard to get whites to buy comics in which the main character was black. And it was even harder to get boys to buy comics about women.”
*
After the initial campaign had failed, the female characters that were introduced in the pages of other titles—Thundra, an angry Femizon in
The Fantastic Four
; Mantis, a Vietnamese ex-prostitute in
The Avengers
; and, in
Marvel Team-Up
, a villainess named Man-Hater—seemed unlikely to emerge as role models.
*

Nonetheless, the mandate was to go for “minority” appeal, so in the summer of 1973, as the last issues of
Night Nurse
and
The Cat
slunk quietly from the newsstands, they were quickly replaced by redoubled efforts toward a surge in blackness. Luke Cage became a high-profile guest star in
Amazing Spider-Man
, while in his own title, Marvel delicately reported, “much of Cage’s jivin’ slang will be eliminated.” African-American bad girl Nightshade battled
Captain America and the Falcon
; Jim Wilson returned to the pages of
The Incredible Hulk
. For
Tomb of Dracula
, Marv Wolfman dusted off Blade, a black tinted-goggles-and-bandolier-sporting vampire hunter he’d conceived in the 1960s.
*
The biracial buddy western comic
Reno Jones and Kid Cassidy: Gunhawks
became
Reno Jones, Gunhawk
when the white half of the team was murdered. The final issues of
Shanna the She-Devil
introduced Nekra, a mutant albino daughter born to an African-American cleaning lady; her criminality was, unsurprisingly, tied up with heavy identity issues. Other new black characters were filtered through the scrim of international exoticism: In
Supernatural Thrillers
, Steve Gerber and Rich Buckler introduced N’Kantu, the Living Mummy; Len Wein and John Romita’s Haitian witch doctor Brother Voodoo began starring in
Strange Tales
; and Don McGregor and Rich Buckler brought Black Panther back to his native Wakanda in
Jungle Action
, a title previously devoted to reprints of white imperialist fantasies from the 1950s.

M
cGregor had been at his proofreading job for a few months, waiting for a chance at writing a title. One that regularly landed on his desk made him wince. “At that time,” he said, “
Jungle Action
was basically blond jungle gods and goddesses saving the native populace from whatever threat. It was pretty racist stuff, and I couldn’t believe Marvel was publishing it.” And then suddenly, he was informed that the twenty-year-old potboilers starring Lo-Zar, Tharn the Magnificent, and Jann of the Jungle would be replaced.
Jungle Action
would now run new adventures of the Black Panther in his native African country of Wakanda—and McGregor would be the writer. “Jungle books didn’t sell. I think they figured, ‘Well, we’ll give Don a jungle book, it’ll die and we’ll have given him a chance.’ ”

But the disregarded
Jungle Action
turned out to be the perfect venue for McGregor’s idiosyncratic vision—because it was a lower-tier book, no higher-ups were looking at his work until it was just about out the door, too close to deadline for major changes. With artist Rich Buckler (later replaced by the African-American Billy Graham), McGregor immediately embarked on a dense, thirteen-chapter saga called “Panther’s Rage,” in which the Black Panther’s alter ego, T’Challa, returns to his homeland and faces revolting countrymen who see him as a sellout for hanging out with the Avengers.

Only two years earlier, in an issue of
The Fantastic Four
, Marvel briefly tried to put distance between the Black Panther and his politically charged namesakes by renaming him Black Leopard. “I neither condemn nor condone those who have taken up the name,” T’Challa told the Thing, in a carefully measured bit of expository dialogue. Now McGregor edged the character further into political territory than ever before, and tackled issues of masculinity and patriotism. The gold-chain outfit that T’Challa sometimes paraded around in recalled Isaac Hayes’s
Wattstax
getup, but that had more to do with black America’s trendy early 1970s appropriation of traditional African garb than with
Jungle Action
becoming one more winking blaxploitation farce. McGregor invested deeply in his characters; the gravitas (and extreme wordiness) that he brought to the comic was typified by the description of the Panther’s American girlfriend, Monica Lynne (“once she was a songstress . . . a minor-grade Aretha Franklin . . . and more recently she spent her days as a social worker . . . until the words of this quiet, eloquent man convinced her she might learn more about different lifestyles and herself here in this jungle paradise”). But McGregor could also have fun: corralling generous volunteers from the Bullpen, he filled out the back of the book with maps, pinup galleries, and text pieces—otherwise, he knew, that space would be tainted by reprints of the old jungle strips.

The characteristic that most immediately set
Jungle Action
apart, however, was McGregor’s resistance to including white supporting characters, including superhero guest stars. “My feeling was, ‘You’re dealing with an isolated, hidden African culture. So where were these white people supposed to come from?’ ” It was the only mainstream American comic book to feature an all-black cast. When the book’s sales remained low, that was not a distinction that Marvel had much use for. For a while, though, McGregor’s staff position afforded him an extra advantage in greasing the editorial wheels. He even had a deal with his fellow proofreader, Steve Gerber: “You don’t edit my books,” McGregor said, “and I won’t edit yours.”

S
teve Gerber gladly accepted the offer. He was happy not to be edited; he was virtually unable to work from a staid template. “Oh, great!” he had a teenager snap in the first Marvel comic he wrote. “It’s those guys who were bothering us at the head shop!” Dialogue like that never would have made its way into
Spider-Man
. Gerber got his start toiling in the horror genre, which he found “a crashing bore,” but working on the nonsuperhero periphery enabled him to experiment. The tagline for
Adventures into Fear
—“Whatever knows fear . . . burns at the touch of the Man-Thing!”—summed up the extent of motivation for its protagonist, a personality-free monster that simply wandered around the swamps of Citrusville, Florida, causing agony to frightened individuals. So when the title was assigned to Gerber, he was forced to look elsewhere for characterization. After establishing that the Citrusville swamp was the “Crossroads of the Universe,” he went about building an extensive, and increasingly bizarre, supporting cast: teenagers Jennifer and Andrew Kale; their grandfather Joshua, who belonged to an Atlantean-worshipping cult called Zhered-Na; a sorcerer named Dakimh; a crew of angry construction workers; and Korrek, a barbarian who emerged from a jar of peanut butter. There was Wundarr, a send-up of Superman so dead-on that DC threatened to sue (Lee, frustrated, nearly removed Gerber from the book). And there was a talking duck named Howard, whom Gerber would later describe as having come to him in a trance as he typed at his home in Brooklyn, the sounds of a salsa record wafting from a neighbor’s apartment.